Does anyone own a scale that they use for shipping books? What do you recommend?

Do you use a real shipping scale or is a food scale good enough?

Jennifer, there is a postal scale in the PBS Kiosk available.  I use my digital food scale and it works fine for most books.  I don't think mine will go over 5 lbs, but that's plenty for most of my book orders.

I use a kitchen scale that measures in pounds.  It takes heavier items.  I don't like single purpose tools, so that's why I chose a kitchen scale - it can be calibrated.  It has paid for itself.

Ruth

I use a digital food scale too, works fine for me.

Cheers,
Catt

i used a food scale for a long time, and it was accurate enough.   i always double-checked on the scales at the post office the ones that were super close to the line, but i don't recall ever finding any that were off.  DH finally got too annoyed at having to come downstairs to the office to retrieve it for using in the kitchen, and i got an actual postal scale instead that's accurate up to 11lbs instead of the 5lb limit on the food scale.

I use a Digiweigh postal scale  scale.  You can buy them on eBay.   It is a great scale - measures in ounces and pounds.  

I use an old food scale.  However, when I have had especially heavy books, (don't laugh now), I weigh myself on my digital scales and then weigh myself holding the book.  I think that it's pretty accurate! 

My MIL gave us a digital food scale for Christmas.  I used it for the first time last week when I was buying PBS postage and it was exactly the same as the PO's weight.  Since Media Mail is priced by the pound, I think it's accurate enough.

Vivian, that is hilarious!  I am not laughing, I promise :)

I use a digital food scale.  It's accurate to 1/8 ounce (or 2 grams). I've seen it available for about $20.

The benefit of a food scale is you can use it to weigh those hard to measure ingredients, like peanut butter.

I have taken books that were close to an ounce to the PO, but my scale has always been correct.

I sometimes weigh the book packages at work if they aren't too bulky to carry to & from the office, but I bought a Pelouze digital from Staples some years back when I was selling books from my website - I really like it, very accurate.

I use the scale I use for my soapmaking which weighs down to tenths of an ounce and up to 13 lbs. It's really just a slightly fancy kitchen/food scale. LOL Works great!

Cheryl

I have two scales I use.  One is a 5lb digital that I paid $12 for at Wal-Mart, the other is a 50lb. shipping scale I bought on eBay for $18.  Both are accurate to a tenth of an ounce.

I purchased a postal digital scale for $39.99 from the local post office.  It weighs up to 10 pounds, is small and can be 9V battery powered (with auto off) or plugged into electrical power with the included power supply cord. The scale table also folds open for larger items.

I have another I got from stamps.com but have been unable to locate it since "the move."

The postal scale display digital pounds and ozs to 1 decimal point.  I.e. 1.11.3 which would be 1 lb 11.3 oz. 

It has already saved me several times (just got it last week) when I was packaging books yesterday and three small books that weighed about 11 oz were marked as over 2 lbs on the shipping screen!  These books were HC w/approx 200 pages.

I changed the weight to indicate it was the WRAPPED weight - which it was - and paid the correct postage. 

It is small, and has a tare feature, so if you have to weight something else that will not stay on it, you can tare it out with a container, and weigh only the contents.

(Tried looking at Walmart and could not find anything but bathroom scales, even in the stationary and household areas.  This Walmart is extremely lacking however, compared to others I have used.)